All posts tagged: Cape Cod

Summer People

Summer People

March 12, 2024

By BETH BOYLE MACHLAN

Most of our old family photos are from the beach, and most of them are of my father. In them, he is always grinning, gleaming from the Hawaiian Tropic suntan oil that scented the denim shirt he wore every summer. My mother loved the beach, too, but did not like to be photographed. In all those years, Dad caught Mom on camera only once, on a boogie board riding a wave, still wearing the sunglasses that stayed on her head all summer, even after dark. She preferred to float, read, and take pictures of my brothers and me. Blindingly pale or perilously pink, like “before” ads for skin cancer, we’re inevitably chewing or punching or blinking, ruining the picture. My father, however, always looks perfect, natural, exactly where he’s supposed to be. His hands are on his hips, superhero-style, as if he’s won some high-stakes game and the beach now belongs to him.

Summer People
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Three Walks

Three Walks

October 28, 2019 , , , ,

By BEN SHATTUCK

A wooden chair, washed up on the beach between Nauset and Wellfleet. All drawings by the author.

A wooden chair, washed up on the beach between Nauset and Wellfleet. All drawings by the author.

 

“We will remember within what walls we lie, and understand that this level life too has its summit, and why from the mountain-top the deepest valleys have a tinge of blue: that there is elevation in every hour, as no part of the earth is so low that the heavens may not be seen from, and we have only to stand on the summit of our hour to command an uninterrupted horizon.”

—Henry David Thoreau, July 1842

 

Cape Cod

The idea to follow Henry David Thoreau’s walks came plainly while I was standing in the shower at dawn one May morning, listening to the water drill my skull and lap my ears, wondering what I could do to stop the dreams of my past girlfriend. This was some time ago, when I couldn’t find a way out of the doubt, fear, shame, sadness, and pain that had arranged a constellation of grief around me. In this last dream, the one that got me into the shower at sunrise, she was in labor. Her husband—my dream had rendered him with dark hair in a cowlick, wearing a red shirt rolled to the elbows—stood bedside, holding her hand while she took deep breaths. I stood against the wall, touching a white handkerchief that I wanted to offer them. She looked up at her husband. He closed his hands over hers, something I must have seen in a movie. Though I wanted to leave the room, I stayed, because my legs weren’t working just then. I kept touching the handkerchief. The baby came. There were three of us in the room, and then there were four.

Three Walks
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Ten Thousand Walks by the Little Pamet River

Ten Thousand Walks by the Little Pamet River

November 12, 2013

By BRENDAN GALVIN

Walking will solve it.

                    — Roman Proverb

river

Spring and fall, winter and summer for more than half my life, I have gone out walking almost daily on a road that edges a vast Cape Cod salt marsh.  This loosens things up before I sit down with my notebook. A stream meanders through the marsh, and where it parallels the road I walk beside it, out to a bay beach parking lot, then down the strand a half mile or so to a stone jetty, one of two that keeps the tide- and wind-mauled sands from closing the entrance to the harbor.

Ten Thousand Walks by the Little Pamet River
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